


The DI Dances

by magistrate



Series: Damaged People [1]
Category: Life on Mars, Torchwood
Genre: Adventure, Angst, Character Study, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-16
Updated: 2007-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:28:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/magistrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out of the paradox and into the Bar & Post. Sam's first night out in the larger universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The DI Dances

Captain Jack Harkness stepped into the Prime Xracsis Bar & Post followed by a man who could only properly be described as an excellent example of shell-shocked cynicism. "Find us a chair," Jack said, patting him on the shoulder--he nodded numbly, and went to find one primarily because it was the path of least resistance.

Jack looked around. The last time he had been here had been about six hundred years in the future--a rowdier era. The bar now was dim, but not dim enough to make it hard to see; quiet, but not so quiet as to discourage conversation. There was a low ambient beat flowing from speakers strategically situated in the floor and walls, a sort of island-drum rhythm just loud enough to cross from subliminal into background. A few of the patrons were moving to it in the center of the room, exhibiting dances from at least ten different species and at least one form of public meditation.

The bartender, a tall Xrassian with burnished silver skin, no nose, and a high, streamlined forehead, pulled a handtowl from hir shoulders with one hand and set to work polishing a large saucer held between two more. Jack suspected it was mostly for display--the dish certainly didn't need polishing, and the bartender hadn't started until he'd walked in.

He walked up to the bar. "Hello," he said with a grin.

The bartender nodded, extending a sleek neck.

"Good selection?"

Sie nodded again.

Jack looked back over his shoulder. His friend had found a chair in the darkest corner of the bar, and was huddled as far away from open air as he could get. His hands were on opposite arms, arms crossed over his chest--probably an unconscious response. He certainly didn't look like he wanted to broadcast his unease. Jack turned back to the bartender, who blinked slow silver eyes. "My friend there needs a stiff drink. What are you offering?"

"Our special on chop tonight is a pan-galactic lemon brick," the bartender said, with a voice as smooth and light as flutes. Jack let himself check hir out, but didn't allow himself to make the first move.  _More important things at stake. And I don't think Expatriot Boy over there would appreciate a threesome this early in the relationship._

"Maybe not that stiff," Jack said, making the universal  _Excuse him--backwater planet_  gesture over the bar. "Something liquid."

"Dolsh lager?" the bartender offered.

"Smooth stuff," Jack said. "You're talking the real deal?"

"Delivered quarterly from Dulles City," the bartender said, producing two bulbous mugs from the mug rack. "Half on the house."

"Awfully generous," Jack said.

The bartender looked over Jack's shoulder. "I'll make it up in volume," sie said.

Jack chuckled. "Thanks."

The bartender drew two long drafts, handing over mugs rich with red foam. "Enjoy."

"We will," Jack said, sliding some hard credits across the bar and taking the mugs. He threaded through the thin crowd to the table, setting both down. "Medically speaking, you shouldn't get to be that color without spending an unhealthy amount of time indoors," he said, then grinned. "Well. I guess it depends on what you're doing."

The only response he got was a weak glare.

Jack pushed the mug forward until it was right under his nose. "Sam," he said. "Look at me. I need to know if you're in shock."

"I'm supposed to tell you if I'm in shock?" Sam demanded.

"It'd help," Jack said, and stuck his fingers in front of Sam's eyes. Sam jumped back. "Well, your reflexes look fine."

"Don't," Sam said.

Jack sighed. "I'm sorry I had to do that."

"Which 'that' are you referring to?" Sam asked. One hand pulled away from his arm, slipping through the mug handle as a matter of instinct.

"Most of them."

Sam set his jaw.

"Look," Jack said. "I told you a time jump might become necessary. I'm sorry we waited so long--"

"Are you insinuating that I'm to blame for what happened?" Sam demanded, and Jack raised both eyebrows.  _Defensive. Do people always assume you're the first to screw up?_

"If anyone's to blame, it's probably me," Jack said. "I knew what was going on. None of you did."

"Nn-hnn," Sam said.

"Well," Jack said, trying to drag the mood up by force of enthusiasm alone. "It's over now!"

"For me, it is," Sam said. "What about the rest of them?"

Jack had the mug halfway to his mouth, but stopped it en route. "They must have hospitals in 1973?"

"What passes for them," Sam said. Jack winced--whatever hospitals had done to him, he didn't believe that tone was justified. Or didn't want to believe it. Sam looked at him, accusing and censorious. "You could have helped them."

Jack set the drink down. "No, I couldn't," he said.  _I never can._

"You can travel in time, but you can't--"

"My priority was getting you out," Jack said. "Fixing the scrape in time."

"You could have gone back," Sam said.

"No, Sam, listen." He raised his wrist, tapping the device. "It's broken. It's erratic. Without a temporal wave stabilizer--"

Sam rolled his eyes. "Right," he said.

"I would if I could," Jack said, trying to look into his eyes, trying to convince him that he was telling the truth.

"Right," Sam said again.

Jack looked at his lager. Sam looked at the wall.

"Is he dead?" Sam asked.

Jack succeeded in taking a drink tis time, winding up with a foam mustache. "Which one?" he asked, and wiped it away.

"All of them. Any of them. DCI Hunt." Sam's other hand joined his first, cupping the bowl of the mug.

Jack thought of three different ways to soften the blow and discarded them. Sam would see through them, and wouldn't appreciate them. "Maybe, maybe not. No way to be sure."

Sam nodded, setting his jaw. "What were they?" he asked. "Those--things. What were they?"

 _Need to make sense of the situation, huh? You'd fit right in with the Time Agency._  "They're similar to a species called  _Reapers_ , but believe it or not, Reapers are much worse," he said. "You were an anachronism, without the benefit of a capsule and the immunization it provides you, and they eat anachronisms. I thought they were chasing me." He raised the mug. "I guess I'm a little overripe."

"Anachronisms," Sam said.

"People out of place in time," Jack clarified. "Ones that approach their own timelines most of all. However you got there, it wasn't an approved mode of time travel. It didn't have the safeguards that would prevent them from identifying you as a potential meal."

Sam laughed, or possibly snorted, or possibly choked. It was hard to tell. "Time travel."

"Yeah." Jack eyed his lager. "You should drink something."

"You expect me to drink away my problems," Sam said, irony thick in his tone. He was making himself the butt of a joke that only he understood. "Good plan."

"I want you to loosen up," Jack said. "You should try it. It's catharthic."

"Where are we?" Sam asked.

"What?"

"Where and when are we? I assume," he said, "that the man tending the bar is, in fact, an alien and not someone with a very good costume."

"Not a 'he,' actually, but yes," Jack said. "We're around the year four thousand seven hundred, Earth time, and we're on a moon of a planet called Xracsis."

"Oh, a moon, is--" Sam's eyes widened in a parody of an impressed expression, before hardening back into thwarted bitterness. "And the patrons, rather than being a carnival or an--I don't know, a convention of some sort, are also aliens, correct?"

Jack looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He didn't look like he was about to break down and start gibbering. Nor did he look especially manic. "You're adjusting awfully well to this."

"I've finally accepted that I've been going mad all this time. You're right; it's especially liberating," Sam said, in approximately the least liberated voice Jack had ever heard. "Cheers," he said, and knocked back half of the mug in a go.

Jack blinked.  _Yep. Definitely spoke too soon._

Sam banged the mug back onto the table, staring over it with an expression two parts desperate to nine parts  _bring it on_.

"You're not going mad," Jack said, making a conscious decision not to tell him how much stronger than Earth lager the drink was. "Just a bit of culture shock. Happens to everyone."

Sam sneered and looked away.

"So," Jack said, employing a none-too-subtle segue of his own. "Who was he?"

"Who?"

"DCI Hunt," Jacks said. "The large man with the great hair."

"DCI Hunt is my superior officer," Sam said, clipping every syllable so neatly Jack wanted to frame them. _Present tense. Okay._

"Just your superior?"

"What else would he be?" Sam said to the wall.

Jack shrugged. "Friend. Nemesis. Cohort. Lover. Lots of choices."

Sam didn't move or react to any of the words. Of course, given how stiff he was already, it would have been hard for him to tense up more without incurring serious muscle damage. "Are you mocking me,  _Captain Harkness_?"

The temperature in the room dropped two degrees centigrade. "No," Jack said.

It rose again, but not by much. "I suppose I should thank you."

"Not necessary," Jacks said. "I have a penchant for good deeds."

"Right." Sam probably didn't believe him. That was okay--he wasn't the one who needed to. Jack felt no particular need to prove himself to him. "I've probably taken enough of your time. Just drop me off somewhere and I won't trouble you further."

"Are you kidding?" Jack asked, toying with the cover of his wrist device. "With this thing on the fritz I'm lucky I found this bar. And if I drop you in the wrong time and those things come after you again--"

"You don't need to worry about me," Sam said. "I don't want to impose."

"I don't leave people behind," Jack said.

Sam looked in no way impressed. Jack swallowed a lump-- _That's not the problem, is it? You'd have wanted me to leave you back there. Right. If I'm going to have any luck this evening, I should remember who's got which issues._  "So, Gene Hunt," he said. "Friend?"

"Is this your routine?" Sam asked, with enough emphasis on  _routine_  that it couldn't not be a euphemism. "Arrive at opportune moments and save the day?"

"Guilty," Jack said with a grin.

"Well, if you don't leave people behind," Sam said, "then you must not be terribly successful." He gestured at the empty chairs ringing their table, and drank. Over the mug, his eyes looked distinctly challenging.

 _Great. He threw down the gauntlet. Oh, DI Sam Tyler from Space-Age Earth, we really don't need to do things like this._  "I used to travel with more people," he said. "I wouldn't have left them."

"Friends?"

"More than that," Jack said.

"Cohorts?" Sam said, deriving more schadenfreude than was appropriate from the reversal. "Lovers?"

Jack looked him in the eye.  _You won't push me._  "More," he said.

Sam looked away.

"Hunt," Jack said. "Was he more?"

"What are you implying?" Sam asked.

"Nothing! Nothing bad," Jack said, thinking  _Space age. What was the culture of the space age?_  "Come on. You can't deny the--"

Sam looked up for the express purpose of glaring at him.

"Camaraderie," Jack said, a diplomatic phrasing utterly ruined by his next words. "He is an attractive man."

"I am not," Sam said, with a tone like liquid nitrogen, "attracted to my DCI."

"Why not? If you don't mind?" Jack said. "I mean, aside from the fact that he's monosexual as a jore spore. And the breath," he added.

"This is not entirely appropriate conversation," Sam muttered to the edge of his mug.

 _Whoops._  "Sorry," Jack said, then reconsidered. "No, I'm not."

Sam glared again, but this one lacked most of the venom of his previous one.

Jack eyed them. "You know, I'm not usually wrong about these."

"Piss off," Sam said.

Jack eyed him again.  _Twitchy. So if I'm not wrong, and I know I'm not; and if I am hot, and I know I am... why is it the only time you look over is when you want to put a fist up my face?_  "Girlfriend?"

"I'd prefer not to discuss--"

"No, then," Jack said. "When was the last time you danced with a guy?"

Sam finished his lager, glaring with enough force to bisect more sensitive species. Jack raised both hands.

"Hey, no judgements. I know you early-twenty-first-century types tend to worry about that."

Sam leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. For a moment Jack superimposed the Doctor over him--black coat, too much pride and a disapproval that focused on him because it was easier than focusing inward. It had only bothered him for a while before he figured it out.

"Why," Sam asked, voice too measured and sober for him not to be intoxicated, "should I tell you?"

 _Because I care,_  Jack didn't say. Nor did he say  _Because you're the most repressed man I've ever met, and I've hung out with Yallanesian monks._  "I'm curious. And very persistent," he added, just for good measure.

Sam's lip twisted.

Jack put on his best unruffled face, and waited.

Soon enough, Sam gave in. "At university," he said. "Year and a half in. I was drunk."

Jack shook his head. "You really don't need to excuse--"

"Too drunk to think twice about doing it in public," he interrupted, with enough force that it became the point and pivot of the conversation. Jack looked down.  _Barbarous age._

"Caught flak?"

Sam glared into the dregs of his lager. "This looks like blood," he said.

"Subtle topic switch," Jack said. "Reassuring one, too. You're lucky I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you."

"Then what are you trying to do? Chat me up?" Sam's head snapped up, eyes blazing.

Jack took the time to take a long drink, rethinking his strategy. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the bartender, who stole up with the silence of Solonian dusks and deposited two more lagers on the table. The empty mugs vanished with him.

"Someone got hold of my texts and inscribed a choice selection of obscenities into the covers," Sam said. "And that was really the least of--" he looked away, eyebrows arching and settling as if he was trying to shake the alcohol off. "Anyway," he said. "That was the end of that."

"What? Forever?" Jack asked.

Sam snorted.

"Talk about negative reinforcement," Jack muttered. "You don't strike me as the type who can't stand up to bullies."

"I'm a police officer," Sam said.

"So what's the problem?"

Sam looked at him with 300% more incredulous disparagement than should have fit in his gaze. "I'm a  _police officer_."

 _Oh, one of **those**  problems. _Something didn't ring right. "Hold on." Jack flipped open his wrist device. "You're an early-21st-century guy. Don't they have laws about--"

"Laws don't manage public sentiment. Can't," Sam said, taking another swallow of lager.

"So? Who cares, if--"

"To police effectively, one must maintain a respectable bearing in the eyes of the public," Sam said, and no one spoke that smoothly, that eloquently, when they were that tipsy unless they'd had the words memorized for years. "I--what I am, has no bearing on the execution of my duties, but nor does it--" he blinked, and put his head down. His next words escaped, muffled, from behind his crossed arms. "Nor should it be allowed to come to the attention of persons whom it might offend, or whose opinion of the Force might be adversely affected by knowing."

Jack eyed him.  _Wow, were you born into the wrong age._  "Screw 'em."

Sam glanced up, weariness and exasperation fighting for broadcast time.

"Well. Not literally. Unless it would help," Jack said.

"You don't care how you present yourself, do you?" Sam asked. "It doesn't cross your mind."

_"Shall we try to get along without the psychic paper?" she'd asked, flustered in all the best ways, and he'd known his mark before she finished the sentence. "Hmm, that would be better"--_

_\--"Ooh, that's a little harsh," he said, and slid one arm behind her back and pulled her in, "I like to think of myself as a criminal"--_

_\--"It's a con. I was conning you--that's what I am! I'm a con man!" he'd almost yelled, thought he'd yelled, and later, under the force of those eyes so full of disapproval and disdain beyond anything a human had been able to level against him, "I harmed no-one!" I harmed no one.--_

_\--"Goodbye," he'd said, from his perch on the German bomb, when what he should have said was "I'm sorry."_

"It's complicated," he said, and drank.

"What isn't," Sam said.

Jack sloshed the lager. "There are things that shouldn't be," he offered.

"Oh?" Sam blinked owlishly at him, still disapproving, but losing the edge to it. "And what might those be?"

Jack knocked back the rest of his mug. He didn't need the courage--never had--but he was enjoying the freedom. The way the alcohol got into his brain, so that the labyrinthine corridors Sam was leading him down were too fogged to see past a couple of bends, so that everything was soft and rounded out. Hopefully they were both drunk--the fewer  _trou de loup_ s Sam's mind provided him with, the better. Jack stood, and extended a hand.

Sam looked at the hand, examining the fingers in front of his eyes before following the line of Jack's arm up to his shoulders, then his neck, then his face. "You are joking."

"They have no concept of human gender," Jack said, tossing his head at the patrons of the bar. "And even if they did, they wouldn't care."

"You are...  _joking_ ," Sam said again, in the peculiar  _If I speak very slowly, everyone will understand me_  way most people adopted with foreigners.

"I do that," he said, and shrugged. "Doesn't mean I'm not serious."

Sam gave him a look that said, in no uncertain terms,  _I am nowhere near **that**  intoxicated._

Jack dropped his hand. "Come on," he said. "Sam. Your entire life just turned upside down. Might as well put something back how it's supposed to be."

Sam looked down, at some indistinct point on the floor between their feet.

"If it helps," Jack said, "you can lead."

Sam sighed. He stood slowly, with the grace of one who'd drag themselves through anything once because they couldn't spare the effort to argue.  _He sure knows how to flatter a guy,_  Jack thought, and took his hand to draw him onto the dance floor.

The beat hadn't changed since they came in--a rhythm low and soothing enough to even out tempers without lulling anyone to sleep. Jack tucked his left hand behind Sam's back, and Sam took his right hand with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man. Jack pulled him into the first steps--Sam was oddly pliant, not quite into it and not quite drunk, but at least moving with him. "There, see?" he asks, turning to catch a glimpse of Sam's eyes. "Not that bad, is it?"

Sam responded by sinking his face into Jack's left shoulder.

Jack stopped when he realized that Sam's feet weren't moving. Sam's hand was still in his, and he hadn't broken away, but at the moment the most interesting thing he was doing appeared to be breathing. Jack shifted his shoulder, nudging Sam's forehead. "Sam?"

Sam said nothing.

"This isn't--" Jack began, and was going to finish with  _dancing_  when something warned him against it. Sam was just heavy enough to force Jack to lean into him to keep them both from toppling over, and distinctly warmer than the air around them. His breath was absolutely moderated--rhythmic, like the drums.

 _Oh,_  Jack thought, and risked a look around. No one was paying any attention to them--just two more individuals of some species or other, making use of the music as they saw fit. Nothing extraordinary, to them.

Jack extracted his right hand, replacing his arm around Sam's shoulder. Sam's hand hung limply by his hip, fingers curled into a loose fist. His breathing was artificially deep and even.

"This works too," Jack murmured into his ear. He thought for a second that he should remember to tip the bartender and closed his eyes, settling into things, swaying to the drums.


End file.
